Broadly there are two types of lotteries. The first is instant win lotteries where a printed ticket provides all of the lottery information. These tickets typically have a play area covered by scratch off material. The tickets can be purchased from a retailer, and the scratch off material removed to reveal whether the ticket is a winner. A second type of lottery is a draw-based lottery or “online” lottery, where a player makes a wager on a subsequently occurring event. For example, a player may guess at numbers that will be drawn. The selected numbers, or randomly selected numbers if the player does not have a preference for the numbers, are printed on a ticket and provided to the player. Once the event occurs, for example the numbers are drawn or generated by the lottery organization, the ticket may be a winner depending on if one or more of the selected numbers were drawn or generated.
Tickets for draw based lotteries are typically printed at the time of purchase on special ticket paper by a printing device approved by the lottery administering body. The ticket will typically have the draw details such as the date, the numbers that have been selected by the customer or generated on behalf of the customer and a control number that uniquely identifies that ticket. Special ticket paper typically meets critical longevity and stress requirements to ensure the ticket will not deteriorate within a certain period of time and that the control number and selected numbers remain legible.
Typically, the printing device is attached to a single lottery terminal operated by the lottery organization. Although the model of a single terminal and printer is effective for single checkout lane environments such as convenience stores and gas stations, it is not ideal for multi-lane environments such as grocery stores, discount and big box retailers. Here, the majority of customers complete their shopping and pay through any one of many checkout lanes. A second stop and purchase is required at the lottery terminal location in order to purchase the lottery draw ticket. This is extremely inconvenient for most customers who simply bypass the lottery counter.
Installing an approved printer or any other piece of specialized hardware at every point of payment within a retail environment is cost prohibitive and not an effective use of capital as not all points of payment are open at all times. This is one of the barriers to lottery organizations expanding their sales within multi-lane retail environments. Other barriers to installing specialized hardware in lane include the lack of available space and the added responsibility and training for the cashier who must operate the hardware.
Using the retailers POS to print the ticket on standard receipt paper is ineffective since receipt paper is typically of the lowest quality and the ticket can deteriorate prematurely if left if sunlight or comes in contact with water.
It would be desirable to enable customers to include a lottery draw ticket in their basket along with other goods and pay for that basket at any point of payment in a retail location. The inclusion of such a lottery draw ticket should not require any additional hardware in lane and should be fully serviced by the existing point of sale equipment. It is also desirable to merchandise draw based tickets in such a way that the customer experience is enhanced with the purchase convenience while increasing product awareness and impulse lottery purchases.
Described herein are methods for selling draw based tickets through the retailers POS without the use of additional hardware to generate or print the tickets.